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Sodium is a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. It is a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable fork of NaCl, with a compatible API, and an extended API to improve usability even further. Its goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools.

Sodium is cross-platforms and cross-languages. It runs on a variety of compilers and operating systems, including Windows (with MinGW or Visual Studio, x86 and x86_64), iOS and Android. Javascript and WebAssembly versions are also available and are fully supported. Bindings for all common programming languages are available and well-supported.

Version 7.2.0 and newer of the PHP programming language includes the Sodium extension (referred to as ext/sodium) as a core cryptography library. Version 2 of the PHP extension in PECL is compatible with ext/sodium in PHP 7.2.

LimeSurvey uses the Sodium Compat library to bridge with different PHP versions.
This library tentatively supports PHP 5.2.4 - 7.x (latest), but officially it only supports non-EOL'd versions of PHP.

Data encryption/decryption methods used in LimeSurvey are based on public-key signatures. Public and secret keys can be found in /application/config/security.php file. Keys are automatically generated on first usage of encryption feature.

Warning : Once data encryption is turned on, data in corresponding database columns would become unreadable without decrypting them first. You should always have a backup of your encryption keys in case they get deleted.
Also, once encryption keys are set, you should never change them because it would make all existing data unusable.

Errors

Possible errors when using data encryption:

library doesn't exists: PHP Sodium library have to be installed to be able to use data encryption feature. Here is a guide on how to install library: Sodium installation. If you don't want to use data encryption, you have to disable encryption in attribute settings.

wrong decryption key: decryption key has changed since data was last saved, so data can't be decrypted. The only way to decrypt data is to retrieve the original key from backup and replace the current decryption key with the original key.